1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for managing data owned by a source system and distributed to subscribing systems for consumption.
2. Background of the Invention
Data is a top priority for every business some of which may be mission critical and challenging to manage. Challenges may stem from: (i) growth in demand due to enhanced digital content, e-mail, internet based applications and emerging technologies in multimedia (e.g., Blu-ray Disc™ (Blu-ray Disc™ (BD) is a registered trademark of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA)), 4G telephone networks, etc.); (ii) pressure to retain data for compliance with growing numbers of regulations worldwide, and (iii) threats to business continuity posed by disaster, outages or even human error. Furthermore, data management is critical in the era of enterprise-wide electronic records management.
Several document and records management software exist on the market today. These products include, e.g., Microsoft Sharepoint®, Hewlett-Packard® AppIQ, Filenet®, DB2® Commonstore, DB2 Information Integrator, IBM Content, Document, and Records Manager, etc. (Microsoft, Sharepoint, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Hewlett-Packard is a registered trademark of Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P., in the United States, other countries, or both. Filenet is a registered trademark of FileNet Corporation, in the United States, other countries, or both. IBM and DB2 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.) These products provide functionality to manage unstructured content and provide policy driven management functions.
Although there are currently technologies available that enable data management, data consistency remains of a primary concern within these products. For example, in the critical area of ensuring data consistency, several subscribing systems accessing the same set of unstructured data may obtain different copies of the document, or even have deleted copies of such documents. That is, it is not uncommon for different subscribing systems to have data which is no longer useful.
In one example, a “source” system creates and/or originates a data object, and is the owner of the data object and “subscribing” systems consume or use the data object once it is distributed by the source system. For example, the subscribing system may use the data object to execute some function, or to create depending data objects or subsequent data records. Also, subscribing systems may create dependent data or objects relating to the received data, either through copy and update procedures or overwriting the original local file. However, once the data is distributed to the subscribers, ensuring data integrity between the source system and subscribing systems becomes very difficult, and situations of data inconsistency may arise such as when the source system deletes a record or file on its local system, but the distributed copies of the data object on the subscribers systems are not deleted, thereby resulting in “rogue” copies, and thus, data inconsistencies.
Moreover, the source system may or may not send a transaction to the subscribing systems indicating that the data object was deleted in the source system, thereby creating data inconsistency. Furthermore, if the source system does send such a transaction, then the subscribing system may or may not take action based on the solution in the subscribing system. Thus, the source system and the subscribing systems may have data inconsistencies and be out of sync. Furthermore, if a subscribing system relates the distributed copy of the data object to another object (e.g., in a subscribing system database), deleting the distributed copy of the data may create an “orphan” document, and thus may create data inconsistencies.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.